@article{8e876121e101412b8b0632144b025be1,
title = "Simple mathematical law benchmarks human confrontations",
abstract = "Many high-profile societal problems involve an individual or group repeatedly attacking another - from child-parent disputes, sexual violence against women, civil unrest, violent conflicts and acts of terror, to current cyber-attacks on national infrastructure and ultrafast cyber-trades attacking stockholders. There is an urgent need to quantify the likely severity and timing of such future acts, shed light on likely perpetrators, and identify intervention strategies. Here we present a combined analysis of multiple datasets across all these domains which account for >100,000 events, and show that a simple mathematical law can benchmark them all. We derive this benchmark and interpret it, using a minimal mechanistic model grounded by state-of-the-art fieldwork. Our findings provide quantitative predictions concerning future attacks; a tool to help detect common perpetrators and abnormal behaviors; insight into the trajectory of a 'lone wolf'; identification of a critical threshold for spreading a message or idea among perpetrators; an intervention strategy to erode the most lethal clusters; and more broadly, a quantitative starting point for cross-disciplinary theorizing about human aggression at the individual and group level, in both real and online worlds.",
author = "Johnson, {Neil F} and Pablo Medina and Guannan Zhao and Messinger, {Daniel S.} and John Horgan and Paul Gill and Bohorquez, {Juan Camilo} and Whitney Mattson and Devon Gangi and Hong Qi and Pedro Manrique and Nicolas Velasquez and Ana Morgenstern and Restrepo, {Elvira M} and Nicholas Johnson and Michael Spagat and Roberto Zarama",
note = "Funding Information: N.F.J. acknowledges support from the Office of Naval Research (ONR) under grant N000141110451 and from the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) via Department of Interior National Business Center (DoI/NBC) contract number D12PC00285. The U.S. Government is authorized to reproduce and distribute reprints for Governmental purposes notwithstanding any copyright annotation thereon. The views and conclusions contained herein are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies or endorsements, either expressed or implied, of ONR, IARPA, DoI/NBE or the U.S. Government. P.M. (Medina) and J.C.B. acknowledge support from COLCIENCIAS through their doctoral funding program. DSM acknowledges support from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (1R01GM105004), the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (R01 HD047417) and the National Science Foundation (1052736). NFJ thanks O. Antony for help with compiling the SOM data files.",
year = "2013",
month = dec,
day = "10",
doi = "10.1038/srep03463",
language = "English (US)",
volume = "3",
journal = "Scientific Reports",
issn = "2045-2322",
publisher = "Nature Publishing Group",
}